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In reply to the discussion: New year brings new attacks on evolution in schools [View all]backscatter712
(26,355 posts)One person is perfectly capable of reading Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. That same person is also capable of visiting the natural history museum and looking at the fossilized dinosaur bones. He's also capable of reading a few basic college biology textbooks, looking up evidence online, and getting a pretty good idea of how evolution works. Maybe not down to every last base pair of DNA, but he can understand perfectly well the principles of mutation, of natural selection, and evolutionary adaptation to the environment. The guys with the PhDs and the expensive lab equipment can get the dirty details about DNA base pairs, publish their research, subject it to peer-review, and give us a knowledge base on which the rest of us can have some confidence.